The path Selia showed him was not a path at all. It was a descent into the city's viscera. The mycelial tunnel was a tight, breathing tube of fibrous, phosphorescent roots that pulsed with a slow, hypnotic rhythm. The air was thick with the smell of loam and the cloying, sweet scent of blooming necrosis. He moved in a crouch, the living walls brushing against his shoulders, leaving faint, glowing dust on his coat. It was like being swallowed by a benevolent, knowledgeable leviathan.
The shard was silent during the journey, a watchful, heavy coldness against his sternum. It had gotten what it wanted. Its host was moving toward the objective. There was no need for further persuasion, only a patient, terrible waiting. Luka's mind, however, was a riot.
He saw Kael's face, or what he imagined it to be—not the featureless helm of the Hound, but a young man's face, twisted in a scream as the metal swallowed his leg. He had been a tool for the Institute, yes. But he was a person. A person Luka had condemned to a fate worse than a clean death. The shard's calculus had deemed him an acceptable loss for the data he might possess. Luka's humanity screamed that no data was worth that price.
*He is the enemy,* a thought-impression, cool and logical, finally emanated from the shard. *His knowledge is a weapon. We are disarming the opposition.*
*He's a man,* Luka shot back, the thought fierce and silent. *You showed me rain on stone. Did you forget what that feels like? To be just a man?*
The shard's silence was its answer. It had not forgotten. It had simply re-prioritized. The memory of beauty was a motivation, not a constraint.
The tunnel began to slope more steeply, and the air began to change. The organic scents were gradually overpowered by a familiar, static-charged foulness. The faint, discordant choir of the Bleed returned, not as a scream, but as a distant, mournful dirge. The mycelial glow of the roots around him dimmed, their light struggling against the pervasive green miasma that began to seep into the tunnel.
He had arrived.
The tunnel terminated in a curtain of thick, rubbery fungus, similar to the one he'd used to escape the Hounds before. Peering through a gap, he saw the cavern of the Old Geothermal Lock from a different angle. He was on a high ledge, looking down across the chasm toward the ruined gantry where the fight had taken place. The massive, irising hatch was still open, the vortex of green energy below still swirling, its light painting the nightmare landscape in pulses of sickly illumination.
And there, exactly as he had left him, was the Hound.
Kael was pinned midway along the twisted remains of the walkway, his right leg fused from the knee down into the metal floor, which had cooled into a solid, grotesque sculpture of his agony. His helmet was off, cast aside to reveal a face that was shockingly young, pale and beaded with sweat. His head lolled against his chest, but his lips were moving, forming silent words, a continuous, desperate mantra.
The shard stirred, its focus becoming a razor's edge. *Now. While he is weak. His mental defenses are nonexistent. We can extract everything.*
Luka ignored it. His eyes were fixed on the man's trapped leg, on the sheer, brutal horror of it. This wasn't a tactical scenario. It was a crime scene, and he was the perpetrator.
He slipped out from the fungal curtain and began to pick his way down a treacherous slope of loose scree and jagged debris, his movements slow and deliberate. The Bleed's influence was weaker here, on the periphery, but he could feel its psychic fingers plucking at the edges of his mind, whispering promises of despair. The shard's blue bubble shimmered faintly around him, holding the worst of it at bay.
He was twenty feet from the trapped Hound when the man's head snapped up. His eyes, wide with pain and terror, focused on Luka. There was no recognition, only the primal fear of a predator's approach.
"Stay back!" Kael's voice was a raw, torn thing. He fumbled at his hip for a sidearm that wasn't there.
"I'm not here to hurt you," Luka said, his own voice low and steady, a stark contrast to the swirling madness around them. He stopped, holding his hands up, palms open.
Kael stared, his mind struggling to process this. "You… you're the seeker. The host." A fresh wave of terror crossed his face. "Is it going to… unmake me? Like it did to Jax?"
The name of the erased Hound hung in the air between them. Luka felt a fresh jolt of guilt. "No. That's not why I'm here."
"Then why?" Kael gasped, a spasm of pain wracking his body. "To gloat? To finish the job?"
The shard pressed against Luka's mind, an impatient, cold weight. *Ask him about the Institute's operational protocols. Their knowledge of the other fragments. The identity of the ash-haired woman. Now.*
Luka took a step closer, his eyes locked on Kael's. "I'm here because leaving a man like this is wrong."
The confession seemed to hang in the corrupted air, a tiny island of morality in the sea of the Bleed. Kael's frantic breathing hitched. He looked from Luka's face to his trapped leg, then back again, disbelief warring with a desperate, fragile hope.
The shard was a storm of silent, furious static in Luka's head. *Sentiment is a computational error. This is a tactical opportunity. Do not waste it.*
*He's a person,* Luka thought back, the thought a solid, unshakable wall. *Not a resource.*
He knelt a few feet from Kael, examining the fusion of flesh and metal. It was a perfect, seamless bond. There was no cutting him free. The shard, in its infinite, cruel wisdom, had provided the solution already. To create the distortion, it had to understand the fundamental structure of the materials. It could unmake the bond as easily as it had made it.
*You would use my power to save the enemy?* The shard's thought was laced with a cold, alien incredulity.
*I'm using your power to fix a mistake,* Luka countered. *My mistake.*
He didn't ask the shard. He commanded it. He focused on the fusion point, on the intricate, chaotic pattern of the Bleed-forced bond, and he *pushed* his will toward the crystal, not as a supplicant, but as a partner. He showed it not the tactical advantage, but the rightness of the act. The necessity of it, for his own soul, if not for its war.
For a long, tense moment, the shard resisted. Its purpose was to cleanse, to order, to fight. Mercy was not in its core programming.
Then, something shifted. A flicker of… not understanding, but… acceptance. The memory of the clean stone and the gentle rain surfaced once more, not as a motivation for war, but as a reminder of what it was they were ultimately fighting *for*. A world where things like this did not happen.
The shard's cold energy flowed through him, not with the violent fury of before, but with a precise, surgeon's touch. A faint, blue-white light emanated from Luka's outstretched hand, settling over the fused joint. The metal began to… *remember*. It lost the chaotic, warped shape forced upon it by the Bleed and began to revert, flowing like liquid mercury, pulling away from the scorched fabric of the Hound's uniform and the blistered skin beneath.
Kael cried out, but this time it was a cry of shock, not pain. He watched, mesmerized and horrified, as the prison that had held him melted away, leaving his leg free, burned and wounded, but whole.
The moment the bond was broken, the shard's presence withdrew, retreating into a watchful, contemplative silence. The act had cost it little energy, but it had cost it a fundamental assumption about its host.
Luka slumped back, breathing heavily. The use of the power was still draining.
Kael stared at his free leg, then at Luka, his eyes wide with a confusion that mirrored the shard's. "Why?" he whispered again, the word laden with a new, profound weight.
"Because I'm not what it is," Luka said, nodding toward his own chest. "And I don't want to be."
He offered a hand. After a moment's hesitation, Kael took it, and Luka hauled him to his feet. The Hound swayed, putting most of his weight on his good leg.
"The Institute…" Kael began, his voice gaining a sliver of its former professional composure. "They'll kill me for failing. For being compromised."
"Then don't go back," Luka said.
"And do what?"
Luka looked toward the ledge he'd descended from, toward the hidden mycelial tunnel. "Survive."
He gave the young man a gentle push toward the slope. "The Spore-Speaker, Selia. Tell her I sent you. She'll hide you."
Kael took a limping step, then stopped, looking back. The conflict on his face was clear. Duty versus debt. Finally, he spoke, his voice low and urgent. "The woman. Commander Valeris. The one with the grey hair. She's not just Institute. She's a direct agent of the Stavo Family. This isn't about research for her. It's about acquisition. They know you have a fragment. They know you're heading for the Aethelburg. They've already positioned a team there. It's not a destination. It's a trap."
The information landed, cold and hard. The shard, listening intently, filed it away with perfect, emotionless clarity.
Kael gave one last, unreadable look, then turned and began the painful climb toward the ledge, toward a uncertain future, but a living one.
Luka watched him go. He had gone against the shard's cold logic. He had chosen mercy over tactical advantage. And in doing so, he had gained the most valuable intelligence of all.
He looked inward, at the silent, waiting crystal. The weapon, or the hand that holds it. He had made his choice. And for the first time, he felt the shard wasn't just judging his decision, but learning from it. The conscience was, perhaps, beginning to remember what conscience truly meant. The path to the Archive was now a path into a trap, but he walked it with a new, fragile understanding. The war for the crystal was not just about power. It was about the soul of the one who carried it.